Many of the counter-terrorism policies introduced in the UK since the middle of the twentieth century have gradually been expanded and directed towards activists, dissidents and campaigners involved in direct acts of political action, protest and trade unionism. It is now well known that police and MI5, for example, used an infrastructure largely created to tackle armed groups in the North of Ireland to keep anti-nuclear campaigners, anti-racism and environmental activists as well as MPs under surveillance.1 Revelations on the ‘spy cop scandal’ in which undercover police systematically infiltrated left-wing protest groups from the 1980s until, at least, 2010 are still coming to light.2 So are reports that ‘troublesome’ construction workers who were active within the trade union movement were ‘blacklisted’ and prevented from securing employment.3 The policing of activists and protest groups – who are generically and pejoratively labelled as ‘domestic extremists’ in current policy parlance – through a highly coercive and politicised policing infrastructure is therefore neither new nor without precedent.4
This chapter uses information acquired under the Freedom of Information Act 20005 to show how the non-violent and peaceful anti-austerity protest groups UK-UNCUT and Occupy London are policed through a counter-terrorism infrastructure. The chapter argues that any approach which conflates peaceful protest with terrorism enables violent and coercive policing practices to be normalised and employed against those democratically and legitimately working to resist austerity and neoliberalism. Such practices challenge the claims that the UK government is committed to human rights processes and that the UK is a ‘liberal democracy’.
There are countless definitions of ‘terrorism’ but in UK law the term very broadly describes violence employed by non-state actors as a way of furthering a political, racial, religious or ideological goal.6 Other than being defined in an extremely broad way, the term is a pejorative and propagandistic one that is used to delegitimise opponents of state power and obscure ‘state terrorism’.7 While the state has not officially labelled anti-austerity activists, protest movements or those who challenge neo-liberalism as ‘terrorists’, there has been a tendency to police ‘domestic extremists’, especially on matters relating to intelligence and surveillance, through a ‘War on Terror’ infrastructure.8 Protestors, as a result, are increasingly viewed as ‘terrorist-like’. Such a category combines and collapses acts of civil disobedience, protest activity and low-level criminal behaviour such as trespassing and property damage with the politically charged category of ‘terrorism’. This process of collapsing categories has very significant consequences in practice. It shapes and feeds stereotypical ideas and imagery which associates protestors and movements with a violent minority that has to be policed through a highly militarised counter-terrorism infrastructure. At the same time, it helps manufacture consent and sustain indifference amongst the general public in relation to the state’s use of coercion and violence against such groups. I now demonstrate how two peaceful and non-violent protest groups who challenge austerity and neoliberalism came to labelled as ‘terrorists’.
In 2011, a one-page document nebulously titled ‘Terrorism/extremism communiqué’ began circulating on the internet.9 The document, which had the City of London Police emblem, comprised information relating to armed attacks conducted by the likes of al-Qaida and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).10 Included in the communiqué, however, were the non-violent and peaceful protest groups Occupy and UK-UNCUT. Both of these groups seek to resist unfair economic policies and challenge austerity, amongst other things. After verifying the authenticity of the communiqué, and working in partnership with the Independent,11 I obtained full details of this ‘Terrorism/extremism communiqué’ through a Freedom of Information Act request to the City of London Police. The information obtained comprised seven individual ‘Terrorism/extremism communiqus’. All seven of them mentioned and included information on the activities of Occupy, UK-UNCUT and other peaceful groups.
One communiqué, for example, states that a ‘Yoga and meditation flash mob’ is planned by the group Wake Up London. Another communiqué notes how ‘UK-UNCUT are planning to attend a conference regarding NHS Reforms and the dismantling of the NHS’. In another, there is talk about ‘reconnaissance’ being undertaken by Occupy activists within the City of London. In all the communiqués, businesses are instructed to confidentially report suspicious activity to the ‘anti-terrorism hotline’. The issue here is not only that such groups have been included in the same category as terrorism but police and counter-terrorism officers in conjunction with businesses and corporations are surveilling and policing non-violent and peaceful protestors through an infrastructure that is fundamentally set up to confront terrorism.
After exchanges of correspondence with me and others who were concerned about those practices, City of London Police released a statement explaining why these two groups had been included in the ‘Terrorism/extremism communiqués’ (Figure 23.1). The statement notes that the information included in the communiqués was collected by Special Branch and the Counter-Terrorism Department situated within the City of London Police. The statement accepted that the title of the communiqué was inaccurate in that it did not reflect the non-violent nature of the protest movements. This was, however, claimed to be the result of a ‘mistake’ and an ‘error’. Moreover, ‘[i]t was never our intention to suggest that we view the Occupy movement as being terrorist or extremist in nature’, City of London Police claimed.
While the ‘error’ claim may have seemed initially plausible, on scrutiny, it is unconvincing. First, it is worth emphasising that any act that is undertaken on seven separate occasions looks less like an ‘error’ and more like a habit; in this case, the habit of not distinguishing between peaceful protest and terrorism. Second, those responsible for collecting information and producing the communiqués are Special Branch and the Counter-Terrorism Department; a fact which means we might reasonably expect that peaceful protestors will be viewed through a terrorist-like gaze. Third, there is still talk about City of London police undertaking activity to counter ‘hostile reconnaissance’ through a project codenamed (at the time of writing) ‘Servator’. Here, we see, yet again, ‘criminals, whether extreme protest groups, organised crime groups or terrorists’ being referred to in the same sentence.12
Figure 23.1 City of London Police press release
Incorporating the policing of peaceful political protestors challenging austerity into a counter-terrorism infrastructure is not without real consequences. Such consequences were clearly visible in the policing of the 2009 G20 London protests. It was during the policing of these protests that the newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson was killed by a police officer from the anti-riot Territorial Support Group (TSG) unit. Militarised policing tactics were also employed in the policing of Climate Camp’s 2008 protest at Kingsnorth power station in Kent, where 1500 public order police officers were deployed to police 1000 protestors.13 Here, they were subject to unlawful anti-terror stops and searches.14 As reported to a Parliamentary Select Committee, not only by protestors but journalists too, the police, rather than facilitating protest were using those anti-terrorism powers to ‘intimidate’ and ‘harass’ protestors as a way of dissuading them from organising and protesting in the future.15 Violence and threats of violence, in other words, were being used to discipline, control and prevent peaceful and democratic protest (see also Chapter 16 by Will Jackson, Helen Monk and Joanna Gilmore).
While unlawful police activity and violence is usually presented as undertaken by overzealous ‘bad-apple’ officers, these officers are not operating in a vacuum. They are operating within the context of a narrative set by politically charged policing institutions. Just take Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary’s (HMIC) language selection when describing environmental activists: they operate ‘in cell like structures in a quasi-terrorist mode to keep secret their movements and intentions’.16 When one also takes into consideration that the various units dedicated to dealing with ‘domestic extremism’ have all been placed under the control of the Counter-Terrorism division within the Metropolitan Police,17 again, the concrete practices of policing are evidence of how the boundaries between terrorism and peaceful protest have been collapsed. More importantly, such practices are evidence of the processes through which the criminalisation of, and use of coercion and violence against, peaceful and non-violent protestors is institutionally guided from the top down.
The targeted use of coercive policies and practices against activists and campaigners through a counter-terrorism infrastructure is neither new nor unique. What the above examples relating to UK-UNCUT and Occupy London demonstrate is that the state and police continue to view non-violent political protest through the gaze of ‘terrorism’ and therefore feel justified in using violence and coercion against them. Though the opponent and nature of the conflict may have changed in the so-called ‘War on Terror’, the boundaries remain blurred between peaceful protest and ‘terrorism’ in practice. This blurring is not without consequence. It generates and perpetuates the public’s indifference to the criminalisation of peaceful protestors and legitimises the continued use of militarised, violent and coercive police policy and tactics against them. Such policing practices undermine the UK’s purported commitment to human rights processes and its claim that it upholds principles of liberal democracy.
1. Seamus Milne, The Enemy Within: Thatcher’s Secret War Against the Miners, London: Verso, 2004; Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police, London: Faber and Faber, 2013.
2. Evans and Lewis, Undercover; Evaline Lubbers, Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark: Corporate and Police Spying on Activists, London: Pluto Press, 2012.
3. David Whyte, ‘Policing for Whom?’, The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 54 (1), February 2015, 73–90.
4. Tony Bunyan, The History and Practice of the Political Police in Britain, London: Quartet Books, 1980.
5. Information released by City of London Police to Rizwaan Sabir under Freedom of Information Subject Access Request, 4 January 2012, Ref: COL/11/625, available at: www.scribd.com/document/77329771/City-of-London-Police-OccupyLSX-FOI-Disclosure (accessed 17 November 2016).
6. HM Government Terrorism Act 2000, Section 1, Part 1, full text available at: www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/pdfs/ukpga_20000011_en.pdf (accessed 24 November 2016).
7. Scott Poynting and David Whyte (eds), Counter-terrorism and State Political Violence: The ‘War on Terror’ as Terror, London: Routledge, 2012, pp. 1–11.
8. Joanna Gilmore, ‘This is not a riot!’: regulation of public protest and the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998’, PhD Thesis, School of Law, University of Manchester, 2013, chapter 8.
9. Rizwaan Sabir, ‘How police branded OccupyLSX and UKUNCUT as “terrorists”’, Ceasefire, 7 January 2012, available at: https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/police-branded-occupylsx-ukuncut-terrorists/ (accessed 24 November 2016).
10. Ibid.
11. Kevin Rawlinson, ‘Police face new questions over approach to protest groups’, Independent, 6 January 2012, available at: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-face-new-questions-over-approach-to-protest-groups-6285707.html (accessed 24 November 2016).
12. Details of the City of London Police’s Project Servator are available at: www.cityoflondon.police.uk/community-policing/project-servator/Pages/Project-Servator.aspx (accessed 17 November 2016).
13. House of Commons, Demonstrating Respect for Rights? A Human Rights Approach to Policing Protest, Joint Committee on Human Rights, Seventh Report, Session 2008–09, 23 March 2009, London: The Stationary Office, available at: www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt200809/jtselect/jtrights/47/47i.pdf (accessed 24 November 2016).
14. Afua Hirsch, ‘Police accused of misusing terror laws against peaceful protests’, Guardian, 23 March 2009, available at: www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/23/police-terrorism-protest-g20-law (accessed 24 November 2016).
15. House of Commons, Demonstrating Respect for Rights?, p. 13.
16. My emphasis, cited in Gilmore, ‘This is not a riot!’, p. 183.
17. Ibid., p. 188.